Cottman Transmission My horrible experience with Cottman Transmission in Round Rock, TX Round Rock Texas

Dear Bill d,

I posted my experience when I first learned about this wonderful site and it greatly helped that enough time had passed that it ruled out any transmission issue. If I had written the post a week after and then my transmission went out, the review would be unwarranted and inaccurate. As it stands, when a shop declares your transmission shot and you continue to drive on it three years and 100K mi. later, the odds are they were wrong. 

Also, I have educated myself about cars to an extent, but I am not an automotive expert and it is unreasonable to expect me to be since that is not my profession. We all have our areas of expertise and I just wish that shops would be honest and not take advantage of naive customers for monetary gain. Even auto mechanics that have worked on cars their entire lives can tell you they don't know much about or wouldn't dare work on transmissions, especially automatic transmissions. It tends to be a specialized field and that is how these shops can justify charging thousands of dollars for one transmission job. So knowing that I did not have much transmission expertise, I would have had to trust and rely on a shop that, in this case, was obviously attempting to rip me off (intentionally or not). I might have paid for it (because of the hard sell and scare tactics employed by the service rep) if my husband had not insisted on a second opinion. I suspect I am not the first or the last customer to fall prey to this kind of business practice - REGARDLESS of gender.

In short, I reject that I should have been educated about transmissions before going in since it is not my field and many lifetime mechanics are not. Consulting with my husband and following his advice to get a second opinion was NOT weakness (female or otherwise). Given my treatment at the hands of the shop rep. I do not believe I could have easily stopped any continued transmission job negotiations and, frankly, it was nice that it stopped once he knew my husband had settled it once and for all. At that point, I just wanted my car put back together and to leave. Am I weak because my husband got it done? Perhaps, but being married means not having to handle these kinds of things myself. That’s what is great about spouses, as they can often succeed where the other may fail. One would have to ask the Cottman rep. if it was because I was a woman that he was trying to hard sell me on a transmission job. Regardless of what other posts you may have read, I never said I thought they were trying to rip me off because I was a woman. I only stated what made me believe they had attempted to rip me off and I based that judgment on the stated events. Ultimately, I put my post up so others can read and decide for themselves and be warned. .”Balls” had nothing to do with it. Good day.